Revolution in Ethics

“What has come to be associated with the notion of the postmodern approach to morality is all too often the celebration of the ‘demise of the ethical’, of the substitution of aesthetics for ethics, and the ‘ultimate emancipation’ that follows.” Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Blackwell, 1993)

That President Obama would choose the Leno Show to speak to the American people about Russia’s Putin is in keeping with the ‘news as entertainment’ plague that stimulates the eyes but deadens the consciousness, in the age of unreality.

In his remarks Mr. Obama suggested that Russia’s actions, vis-a-vis Snowden, hearkened back to the Cold War — a time when Russia (the Soviet Union) was demonized by the US.

Actually, it is Mr. Obama and the entire US government who are acting more like Lenin/Stalin, these days, and Putin more like Jefferson. But the American people, gorging on American pop-culture, are too empty, disconnected, or complicit to do anything about it.

The words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn could be applied to Americans today: “The (jail) cell was constricted, but wasn’t freedom even more constricted? Was it not our own people, tormented and deceived, that lay beside us there under the bunks under and in the aisles?” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago (Harper, 1973)